Amazon Fire TV: Fix “Low Storage” Error

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 @ 6:12 pm

I have a rooted Amazon Fire TV (AFTV) and in the past month have been running into “Low Storage Space” errors. At first I thought it was being caused by Kodi so I followed guides to clear the thumbnails folder, but to no avail. I’ve just managed to solve this issue and wanted to document the solution and steps.

The cause of this issue in my case was the /data/data/com.amazon.tv.launcher/databases/mbcache.db file as mentioned here, which is one of the cache files for the default Amazon TV Launcher.

I’m not sure if this issue only affects rooted boxes, or specific versions, and do not know why it has started happening after running over a year without any problems.

If the file size appears normal (e.g. not 3GB), then the culprit might be another app on the AFTV and there is no need to continue following these steps. Skip down to the “Cleaning up Kodi” section below.

If the mbcache.db file is the culprit, let’s go ahead and remove the file:

rm mbcache.db

(optional) If you are like me and do not use the default Amazon TV Launcher, let’s go ahead and permanently resolve this issue. Run the following two commands:

touch mbcache.db
chmod 0 mbcache.db

Without the above two commands, the mbcache.db file is known to accumulate in file size quite quickly. You may need to repeat steps #1-5 if you encounter the low storage warning message again.

Note – if you encounter issues with Amazon Launcher after the chmod 0 command above: run the following command to undo it:

cd /data/data/com.amazon.tv.launcher/databases
chmod 660 mbcache.db

After we are done, we can reboot the AFTV:

reboot

The commands in steps #5 and 6 above: 1) remove the enormous mbcache.db file and frees up space; 2) create a new 0-byte mbcache.db file, and 3) set the permission on it so there’s no chance for it to accumulate in size again.

A side-effect of this solution is that in the default Amazon TV Launcher, several of the menu items will not populate with anything. As I mentioned earlier, I use FireStarter as my app launcher.

Cleaning up Kodi

If you stopped at #4 above and do use Kodi extensively, Echo Wizard is an excellent add-on which can automatically wipe cache files in Kodi to free up space.